The Alligator People! The Fed Is Reporting Billions in Losses Weekly And Still Paying High Interest Income To The Mega Banks on Wall Street (As Biden Recklessly Transfers Student Loans To Taxpayers)

Joe Biden, his Administration, and The Federal Reserve are really “The Alligator People.” Despite what they tell you, they have small brains (particularly Biden) and are hyperfocused on spending.

A good example comes from “Wall Street On Parade” where they show that The Federal Reserve is still paying BILLIONS to US Treasury in the form of remittances (losses). While at the same time, paying the mega banks on Wall Street high interest loans.

As of April 3 of this year, the Federal Reserve (Fed) has racked up $161 billion in accumulated losses. We’re not talking about unrealized losses on the underwater debt securities the Fed holds on its balance sheet, which it does not mark to market. We’re talking about real cash losses it is experiencing from earning approximately 2 percent interest on the $6.97 trillion of debt securities it holds on its balance sheet from its Quantitative Easing (QE) operations while it continues to pay out 5.4 percent interest to the mega banks on Wall Street (and other Fed member banks) for the reserves they hold with the Fed; 5.3 percent interest it pays on reverse repo operations with the Fed; and a whopping 6 percent dividend to member shareholder banks with assets of $10 billion or less and the lesser of 6 percent or the yield on the 10-year Treasury note at the most recent auction prior to the dividend payment to banks with assets larger than $10 billion. (This morning the 10-year Treasury is yielding 4.41 percent.)

Operating losses of this magnitude are unprecedented at the of Fed, which was created in 1913. In a press release dated March 26, the Fed stated this: “The Reserve Banks’ 2023 sum total of expenses exceeded earnings by $114.3 billion.”

As of March 13 of this year, the Fed’s accumulated losses stood at $156.24 billion and yet on March 20 the Federal Reserve voted to sustain those high 5+ percent interest rates to its member banks – making it look like the captured regulator it is considered to be by millions of Americans.

As the chart above indicates, the Fed’s ongoing weekly losses have ranged from a high of $3.3 billion for the week ending Wednesday, January 31, 2024, to $1.86 billion for the most recent week ending Wednesday, April 3, 2024.

American taxpayers have good reason to sit up and pay attention to the Fed’s giant and ongoing losses. That’s because when the Fed is operating in the green, as it was on an annual basis for 106 years from 1916 through 2022, the Fed, by law, turns over excess earnings to the U.S. Treasury – thus reducing the amount the U.S. government has to borrow by issuing Treasury debt securities. According to Fed data, between 2011 and 2021, the Fed’s excess earnings paid to the U.S. Treasury totaled more than $920 billion.

The loss of remittances from the Fed means the U.S. government will go deeper into debt, putting a heavier tax burden on the U.S. taxpayer and raising the risk of another credit rating agency downgrade of U.S. sovereign debt.

Of course, The Allgator People like Joe Biden, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chair Jerome Powell, will Treasury remittances as “free money” to spend. And its an election year, so Joe Biden (aka, King Gator) is canceling $7.4 billion in student debt for 277,000 borrowers. Only alligators in Washington DC considered this action to have no consequences.

WHO pays for the student loan forgiveness? It just doesn’t vanish, it is transferred to taxpayers. Alligators like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez going on talk shows to argue the benefits of being free from financial obligations that student voluntarily agreed to. Say, can AOC get my mortgage forgiven?? Just kidding. Now those same students can borrow additional money to get MBA degrees with the expectation that the student loan is “free money.”

Yes, Biden is acting recklessly (no surprise). Here is a picture of King Gator, Joe Biden.

The Biden Administration and The Federal Reserve ARE the alligator people. Except these gators are hungry for your money and votes constantly.

Prosit! REAL Inflation Rate Under Biden Peaked At 18% In 2022 (Highest Inflation Rate In 50 Years)

Despite Biden’s rambling that inflation is improving, bear in mind that the inflation rate is at it highest in 50 years. Yes, it has improved from 18% in 2022 to above 10% today.

A recent research paper by four noted economists, including Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary under Barack Obama and former Harvard President, discovered that the real inflation rate during the Biden years, using pre-1983 calculations reached 18% in 2022.

The number is the highest inflation rate the country has seen in over 50 years.

Here is the source paper by Summers et al from the NBER.

Prosit!

Simply Unaffordable! One Reason Biden Is Losing The Youth Vote: Unaffordable Housing (Mortgage Rates UP 160% Under Biden, Home Prices UP 32.5%)

One reason that America’s youth is disgusted with Bidenomics is skyrocketing prices, particulalry housing. (simply unaffordable). Thanks to awful economic policies, home prices are up 32.5% under Biden and 30-year mortgage rates are up a whopping 160%! Good luck buying a home with a part-time job.

The bad news is that the 10-year Treasury yield rose to 4.53%, the highest since November 2023. This means that mortgage rates will rise even further.

Yes, rising rates AND home prices are daunting to part-time job holders.

Of course, Biden and Powell want to addicted to gov.

Doctors, doctors (Yellen and Brainard), we’ve got a bad case of unaffordable housing.

Newsomnomics! US Deficit Tops $1.1 Trillion For First Six Months Of Fiscal 2024 As Spending Hits 2024 High (Producer Prices Rose At Fastest Pace In A Year In March)

It looks like “10% Joe” Biden is an older, more demented version of California Governor “Greasy” Gavin Newsom. They both loved spending taxpayer money and running up enomous budget deficits.

Under Biden’s “Reign of Error”, the interest on US debt just hit a record $1.1 trillion and the US deficit for just the first six months of fiscal 2024 is also $1.1 trillion.

According to the latest Treasury Monthly Statement, in March the US deficit hit $236 billion, some $40 billion more than the $196 billion expected, if below February’s $296 billion…

… which was the result of $332 billion in govt tax receipts – translating into $4.580 trillion in LTM tax receipts, and which was down 5% compared to a year ago…

… offset by the now traditional ridiculous monthly outlays, which in March amounted to $568 billion, up from $567 billion in February and the highest monthly spending total in calendar 2024, which translated into a 6 month moving spending average (for smoothing purposes) of $542 billion. Take a wild guess what will happen to the chart below during and after the next recession.

This, incidentally, is a reminder that the US does not have a tax collection problem – it has a spending problem, and no amount of tax changes will fix it; in fact all higher taxes will do is force more billionaires to move to Dubai where they pay zero taxes.

Putting the YTD deficit in context, in the first six months of fiscal 2024, the US deficit hit $1.065 trillion, just shy of the $1.1 trillion reached last year, which was the 2nd highest on record and only the post-covid 2021 was worse. Annualized, we expect total deficit to hit $2.2 trillion in fiscal 2024, a year when the US is supposedly “growing” at a nice, brisk ~2.5% pace. One can only imagine what the GDP growth would be if the US wasn’t set to have a wartime/crisis deficit…

… and we can’t even imagine what US deficit will be after the next recession/depression.

Meanwhile, as reported previously, total US interest continues to explode, and after surpassing total annual defense spending about a year ago, just the interest on US debt will soon become the single largest government outlay as it surpasses social security by the end of 2024, when according to BofA’s Michael Hartnett it hits $1.6 trillion…

.. and surpasses Social Security spending as the single largest spending category in the US government.

Biden has wanted to get rid of Social Security for a long-time and now wants to get rid of Medicare Advantage programs and put everyone on Medicare. Looks like Cloward-Piven!

On top of skyroceting budget deficits, we have Producer Prices rising at fastest pace in a year in March.

After yesterday’s CPI-surge, PPI followed along, with headline producer prices rising 0.2% MoM (+0.3% MoM exp), pushing the YoY PPI to +2.1% (+2.2% exp) from +1.6% – the highest since April 2023…

Source: Bloomberg

Core CPI rose 2.4% YoY (hotter than the expected 2.3%) – the third hotter-than-expected core PPI print in a row…

Under the hood, Services prices rose while goods prices declined MoM.

One thing that stands out as rather odd is the 1.6% MoM decline in Energy costs in the month… as prices soared for crude and gasoline?

Leading the March decline in the index for final demand goods, prices for gasoline decreased 3.6 percent…

And blame the markets for why the print was hot:

A major factor in the March increase in prices for final demand services was the index for securities brokerage, dealing, investment advice, and related services, which rose 3.1 percent.

And on a YoY basis, Services costs are accelerating…

Pressure continues to build in the inflation pipeline too…

While some may cling with grim hope to the ‘cooler than expected’ headline PPI print, core PPI is hot, damn hot, and headline PPI is rising. Not at all what The Fed, or Biden, wants to see – no matter how hard they spin it.

This is Victor Davis Hansen from Stanford’s Hoover Institute.

Biden’s Mortgage Market Getting Hammered! Unadjusted Mortgage Purchase Demand (Applications) Fall 4% Since Last Week, Fall 23% Since Last Year

Well, the US mortgage market is getting hammered by inflation and The Federal Reserve.

Mortgage applications increased 0.1 percent from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending April 5, 2024.

The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, increased 0.1 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier. On an unadjusted basis, the Index increased 0.2 percent compared with the previous week. The seasonally adjusted Purchase Index decreased 5 percent from one week earlier. The unadjusted Purchase Index decreased 4 percent compared with the previous week and was 23 percent lower than the same week one year ago.

The Refinance Index increased 10 percent from the previous week and was 4 percent higher than the same week one year ago.

BeelzBiden? Automobile ‘Bidenvilles’ Are The New Shantytowns Amid US Housing Affordability Crisis (House Prices UP 32.5% And Purchasing Power Of The Dollar DOWN -16.1%)

Joe Biden (aka, BeelzeBiden) is really a piece of … work. His policies are helping drive prices through the roof, he seeks to protect deepstate employees against removal by Trump, had a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and is getting the US engaged in possible hot wars in Ukraine (against Russia), open borders allowing US crime to spike, seems to be suppoporting Hamas over our long-time ally Israel, the list goes on. Biden’s big push for electric cars is a Socialist fantasty and simply unrealistick, drives up energy costs and is EXPENSIVE. It is like Biden is the demon Beelzebub from the TV show “Supernatural.” I once referred to Washington DC as “Mordor on The Potomac.”

Throw in the Federal Reserve operating outside their mandate (excessive interference in the financial crisis of 2008, the excessive interfernce after the Covid outbreak in 2020) and the two together are destroying the US.

Look at housing prices (up 32.5% under Biden) against the purcchasing power of the US dollar (down -16.1% under Biden).

And with mortgage rates up 156% under Biden and housing prices up 32.5% (not to mention the last two jobs reports showed US firms are only hiring part-time workers (and illegal immigrants), the US is experiencing a serious housing affordability crisis.

When people couldn’t afford housing during the Great Depression, they built shantytowns from scrap construction supplies and named them “Hoovervilles,” after President Herbert Hoover. Today, Americans increasingly live out of their cars because they can’t afford housing. If history is any guide, will parking lots full of Americans soon be known as “Bidenvilles”?

The problem has gotten so bad that Sedona, Arizona, recently set aside a parking lot exclusively for these homeless workers. The city is even installing toilets and showers for the new occupants.

Apparently, the City Council thought installing temporary utilities was cheaper than solving the area’s cost-of-living crisis.

And what a crisis it is.

The average home in the city sells for $930,000, while most of the housing available for rent is not apartments, but luxury homes targeted at wealthy people on vacation.

With such a shortage of middle-class housing and with starter homes essentially nonexistent, low- and even middle-income blue-collar workers have nowhere to go at night but their back seat.

Much like America’s Great Depression in the 1930s, this marks a serious regression in our national standard of living. But shantytowns were not prevalent in the 1920s (a decade that began with a depression) or the 1910s. Nor were they ubiquitous following the Panic of 1907, which set off one of the worst recessions in American history.

Indeed, Americans in the Great Depression faced such a cost-of-living crisis that many were forced to accept a standard of living below what their parents and even their grandparents had.

Fast-forward about 90 years, and countless families are in the same boat. Many young people today don’t think they’ll ever be able to achieve the American dream of homeownership that their parents and grandparents achieved. The worst inflation in 40 years, rising interest rates, and a collapse of real (inflation-adjusted) earnings mean a huge step backward financially.

That inflation has pushed up rents so much that young Americans are moving back in with their parents at rates not seen since the Great Depression because they can’t make it on their own. Sometimes, they can’t even make it with multiple roommates.

But many people cannot move back in with family, so the car it is.

The housing problem is not limited to wealthy towns in Arizona, however. It is systemic. The monthly mortgage payment on a median-price home has doubled since January 2021, and rents are at record highs. Like the Great Depression, this disaster stems from impolitic public policy.

For the past several years, the government has spent, borrowed, and created trillions of dollars it didn’t have. The predictable result of this profligacy was runaway inflation, followed by equally foreseeable interest rate increases.

The deadly combination of high prices and high interest rates has frozen the housing market and reduced homeownership affordability metrics to near-record lows. In several major metropolitan areas, it takes more than 100 percent of the median household after-tax income to afford a median-price home.

Since rents and virtually all other prices have risen so much faster than incomes over the past three years, even renting is unaffordable today, so many people have to go into debt to keep a roof over their heads. And for some, that’s a car roof.

This is the kind of story you might expect from a Third World country or somewhere behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, not the largest economy in the world—at least not outside of a depression like the one in the 1930s.

Hoover certainly deserved some blame for the Great Depression, but so did the progressives in Congress, who came from both parties and repeatedly voted to meddle in the economy instead of allowing it to recover from the initial downturn.

Similarly, President Joe Biden deserves blame for constantly advocating runaway government spending. (Runaway Joe??)

But today’s multitrillion-dollar deficits are also made possible by the big spenders in Congress, who come from both parties.

If this bipartisan prodigality of Washington continues, Bidenvilles will only become more widespread as the housing affordability crisis worsens.

Biden’s official White House portrait.

Washington DC under Biden and Schumer, Pelosi, etc.

Bizarro World! 10-year Treasury Yield Rise To 4.38% On Horrible Jobs Report (Mortgage Rates Headed To 8%)

All aboard the crazy train!

Today’s jobs report was terrible despite the sheer number of jobs added. Why? They were all part-time jobs.

And on that “all part-time jobs” report, the US 10-year Treasury yield rose to 4.38%.

Which means that mortgage rate will follow upwards. All based on part-time job growth.

Bizarro World! Unfortunately, the Federal government and Federal Reserve think they are Superman. But only in Bizarro World.

About That Fantastic Jobs Report … Full-time, Native Jobs Shrink, Part-time, Foreign-born Jobs Rise On Year-over-Year Basis, Virtually No Manufacturing Jobs Added But 71k Government Jobs Added (Black Unemployment Increases)

To quote the song “Sloop John B”, “Let me go home, I wanna go home. This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.” The lyrics should change to “This is the worst ADMINISTRATION I’ve ever experienced.”

Like last month, today’s jobs report for March is better than Februrary’s miracle report, but has some glaring bad news that the Administration and slobbering media will ignore. Now you know why I no longer appear on CNBC, CNN or Fox Business anymore.

Let’s start with the good news! The BLS reported that in March, the US added a whopping 303K jobs, tied for the highest since Jan 2023!

Turning our attention to the unemployment rate, it unexpectedly dipped again, dropping to 3.8%, from 3.9%, in line with estimates, as the number of unemployed workers dipped modestly from 6.458 million to 6.429 million while the number of employed workers rose by almost half a million workers; the unemployment rate for Blacks (6.4 percent) increased in March to the highest level in almost two years, while the rates for Asians (2.5 percent) and Hispanics (4.5 percent) decreased. The jobless rates for adult men (3.3 percent), adult women (3.6 percent), teenagers (12.6 percent), and Whites (3.4 percent) showed little or no change over the month.

In contrast, the participation rate rose from 62.5% to 62.7%, above the 62.6% expected, as the overall civilian labor force increased slightly less than the number of employed people.

Now for the not-so-good news. The average hourly earnings came in as expected, rising 0.3% MoM, up from last month’s upward revised 0.2% sequential increase (revised from 0.1%), On an annual basis, the hourly earnings rose 4.1%, as expected, and down from 4.3%. This was the lowest print in almost three years: the last time wages rose by this much was the summer of 2021.

Now for the bad news.

For those wondering if the jobs were all part-time, the answer is a resounding yes: in March, full-time jobs dropped by 6,000 as Part-time jobs soared by 691,000.

On a year-over-year (YoY) basis, full-time jobs were down -1.0% while part-time jobs were up 7.1%

Native-born versus foreign born? On a YoY basis, native-born employment was down -0.5% while foreign-born employment increased by 4.2%.

Not only is Biden importing Democrat voters (since 70% of Americans HATE Biden’s policies), they are also displacing native-born Americans in the labor force.

Manufacturing jobs added were ZERO. So, much for all of Biden’s claims. But NON-PRODUCTIVE government jobs were up 71,000. So our manufacturing jobs are dead while non-productive government jobs are growing like crazy.

Under Biden, the Administrative state is growing faster than manufacturing since Feb 2023. The Biden Administration implements new rules to prevent Trump’s ability to purge deep state employees if re-elected in 2024.

How will The Fed respond? Likely will lead to limited rate cuts.

On related news, horse-faced John Kerry’s daughter says BILLIONS of Humans Must Die for the ‘New World Order’. This reminds me of China and Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and the starvation of 45 million people.

Another Lousy Job Market Indicator: WARNs Are Soaring… And Challenger-Grey Announced That March Saw Most Job Cuts Since January 2023

Bidenomics was born under a bad sign. Or born under large corporate donor payoffs.

In the real world labor market, 2024 has been a deluge of layoffs of the US economy…

1. Everybuddy: 100% of workforce
2. Wisense: 100% of workforce
3. CodeSee: 100% of workforce
4. Twig: 100% of workforce
5. Twitch: 35% of workforce
6. Roomba: 31% of workforce
7. Bumble: 30% of workforce
8. Farfetch: 25% of workforce
9. Away: 25% of workforce
10. Hasbro: 20% of workforce
11. LA Times: 20% of workforce
12. Wint Wealth: 20% of workforce
13. Finder: 17% of workforce
14. Spotify: 17% of workforce
15. Buzzfeed: 16% of workforce
16. Levi’s: 15% of workforce
17. Xerox: 15% of workforce
18. Qualtrics: 14% of workforce
19. Wayfair: 13% of workforce
20. Duolingo: 10% of workforce
21. Rivian: 10% of workforce
22. Washington Post: 10% of workforce
23. Snap: 10% of workforce
24. eBay: 9% of workforce
25. Sony Interactive: 8% of workforce
26. Expedia: 8% of workforce
27. Business Insider: 8% of workforce
28. Instacart: 7% of workforce
29. Paypal: 7% of workforce
30. Okta: 7% of workforce
31. Charles Schwab: 6% of workforce
32. Docusign: 6% of workforce
33. Riskified: 6% of workforce
34. EA: 5% of workforce
35. Motional: 5% of workforce
36. Mozilla: 5% of workforce
37. Vacasa: 5% of workforce
38. CISCO: 5% of workforce
39. UPS: 2% of workforce
40. Nike: 2% of workforce
41. Blackrock: 3% of workforce
42. Paramount: 3% of workforce
43. Citigroup: 20,000 employees
44. ThyssenKrupp: 5,000 employees
45. Best Buy: 3,500 employees
46. Barry Callebaut: 2,500 employees
47. Outback Steakhouse: 1,000
48. Northrop Grumman: 1,000 employees
49. Pixar: 1,300 employees
50. Perrigo: 500 employees

But, according to the government-supplied data…

The number of Americans filing for jobless benefits for the first time last week rose from 212k to 221k (SA) to its highest since Jan, and claims ticked modestly higher on an NSA basis

Source: Bloomberg

Continuing claims remain glued around 1.8mm Americans – where they have been for nine months…

Source: Bloomberg

But, here’s the thing… WARNs are soaring… and Challenger-Grey just announced that March saw the most job cuts (90,309) since January 2023…but government-supplied data on initial jobless claims continues to smoothly tick along near record lows…

Source: Bloomberg

The WARN data is very disturbing.

Ah, Bidenomics!!

If Trump wins in November, will all this data suddenly be ‘allowed’ to reflect reality?

But the feral pigs are already here in Washington DC as elected representative and non-elected bureaucrats.

Might explain the rush to gold.

Pushin’ Too Hard? Strategic Petroleum Reserve Draining To Combat Biden’s Energy Policies (Crude Oil UP 73% Under Biden, Food UP 21%, Rent UP 19.4%, Cocoa UP 136%, Mortgage Rates UP 156%)

Bidenomics is really about insane money printing after Covid and the installation of Biden as President. Biden and The Federal Reserve are both pushin’ too hard. Biden to fundamentally change the US and The Fed trying to cope with the inflation reaction. With Covid and then Biden’s selection as President, Federal outlays exploded (blue line) and remain elevated under Biden. To help finance the (outrageous) spending The Federal Reserve massively increased the M2 Money supply (green line). Now, The Fed has withdrawn some of the excessive monetary stimulus, but there is a staggering amount monetary stimulus still swimming around the economy like a Great White Shark.

The problem with Federal policies (energy, government spending, government debt) is that there are unpredictable factors that undo the best laid plans of mice and men. And rats such as crop blights and changes in consumer habits.

A good example is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which can be drained if craven politicians want to manage oil and gasoline prices for political purposes. Unfortunately, the promise of replenishment is made difficult by rising crude oil prices. The Biden admin cancels plan to refill emergency oil reserve amid high prices (some caused by factors such as war, often caused by government).

In fact, spot crude is up 73% under Biden. Partly, because of Biden’s promised war on fossil fuels and international disasters like war, blights, etc. This is why I cringe when I hear politicians and “economists” discuss why inflation will fall.

On the food side, we have cocoa prices rising 136% under Biden. Again, not predictable when policies were being made. Combine crop blights were rising transportation costs and DC, we have a problem! But this is one reason why The Fed, etc, focus on core inflation (excluding energy and food prices).

There are many examples of rising prices and how they hurt consumers, particularly middle-class and low wage workers.

How did The Federal Reserve react to the inflation Biden helped create? They raised The Fed Funds Target Rate (Upper Bound) by 2,100% to combat Bidenflation. Freddie Mac’s 30-year mortgage rate is up 156% helping to crush homeownership aspiration for younger households.

And then we have Congress/Biden shoveling more than $10 billion in subsidies to Intel, even though Intel has an incentive to develop chips using borrowed funds and Intel retained earnings. But why put your shareholders at risk in case the chip gamble doesn’t payoff. Just shift the risk to US taxpayers!